I did a little experiment a few weeks ago – I was curious about what key words or phrases attract a lot of attention in the blog world. So I did some research and came up with the post called: “Sex, Peed Pants, Star Trek, iPhones, Scrabble and Ukuleles”. Frankly my money was on “sex” or “Scrabble” – although I must admit an enthusiastic interest for all of these topics – except, of course, peed pants. That’s despite the fact that I probably have more firsthand experience with peed pants than all of the other topics put together – which is scary, since I am not a mother…

As is the case with many of my experiments, the results of this one were totally unexpected. For starters, I imagine that many of you bloggers out there are wondering whether writing a post touching on these topics actually did draw any extra traffic to my site. Well, at first there was no effect. For the first couple of weeks after I posted it, I actually got fewer hits. Then everything changed and my numbers did skyrocket. In fact, that one post has had more than 1000 hits in the past 30 days – that’s twice the number of hits on all of my other post combined – and ~20% of all of the hits on my site to date! So was it Sex? Was it Peed Pants? NO – as you’ve probably guessed from the title – it’s been all about Star Trek! More than half of those 1000 hits came via web searches for Star Trek. So, as a ‘thank-you’ to all of those people who’ve been coming to my site because of their interest in Star Trek – I am devoting the rest of this blog to one of my favorite topics… Yes, you guessed it! Star Trek! And even if you’re not a Trekkie yourself – read on – hopefully you’ll enjoy it anyway… maybe you’ll even learn something new and useful to help you interact with the other 99.99% of the world out there – most of whom are not ready to admit to being Trekkies either.

First off – I guess I am coming out of the closet a bit here – since I am admitting to being a Trekkie myself… It’s true, I am – I can still remember our family gathering around the old black and white TV each week to watch the original show back in the 60’s. The first episode I remember seeing was the one in which a silicon based life form was killing miners – the beast turned out to be a mother protecting her young. The famous Vulcan mind meld had to be called upon to sort that mystery out.

And who could forget the trouble with those Tribbles – so cute, until they multiplied out of control and filled the ship. Hmm – come to think of it, that one sort of reminds me of life at the Hicks’s Cat Ranch … very scary indeed…

Of all of the Trekkie TV series – I enjoyed the Next Generation the most – probably because of Data – his attempts to laugh have always reminded me of the stilted laughs I get in class when I tell my students a joke. I know they are faking it, too – just so that I’ll be nice when exam time rolls around…

I love all sci-fi – good or bad – movies, TV or books – but it’s always great when sci-fi makes us think about how savage and uncivilized we still are and motivates us to improve. My favorite Star Trek episode of all time was in the Voyager series – the one called “Scientific Method”. Everyone on the ship is feeling terrible – going through agony in fact – but no one can figure out why until they expose the fact that an alien species is using all of them for medical research. How outrageous! But hey – they’re only humans… an inferior species… The aliens are more intelligent and have the means to make it happen and they don’t care that the humans are suffering terribly – after all – millions of alien lives could be saved with the cures they develop using their human guinea pigs. Kind of makes you think – doesn’t it? Watch that episode, then pop over to the Fauna Foundation to make a donation… And you gals out there – maybe think about boycotting make-up from companies that torture animals while testing their products? It’s bad enough that we do it for medicine – but let’s not do it just to look good… There are lots of beauty product choices out there that are animal friendly… here’s a link to help you find them. Okay – well, I digress – but hey, that’s what good sci-fi is supposed to do right? …make you think.

Getting back to Star Trek – I have to say that the Star Trek series I anticipated with the most excitement, and ultimately was the most disappointed by, was the Enterprise series. This could have been terrific – the concept was great and it did have a few good moments – buy hey – most of it was just so darn boring! I think the mistake they made was in recycling too many characters – to me they just seemed like homogenized versions of Spock, Data and 7of9…

Things are looking up though – I think the latest movie was fabulous! Now if they could roll that over into a series – it might be worth watching! In fact there may be a new TV series in the offing – though it looks like it won’t be a spin-off from the latest movie.

Other good news on the Trekkie front? Well – did you know you can take a university course on Star Trek?! No kidding! Hmmm – that gives me an idea. I wonder what the Dean would say if I changed up the content in my hydrotechnical design course to cover the integration of Star Trek gadgets into modern technology instead? While you’re waiting for that, you can read some teasers: Star Trek Events Which Should’ve Happened By Now.

Love it or hate it, Star Trek is more ingrained in our western culture now than Shakespeare. We may each quote ‘the Bard’ every two or three days – but when was the last time you made it through a single day without using your ‘communicator’?

Live long and prosper, Trekkies!

Note – for photo credits, place your mouse over the picture; click on the picture to go to the original source…

Loved this one !! … I consider myself to be a bit of a ‘trekkie’ too, but I think the real hard-core fans call themselves ‘trekkers’ ? Your post brought back a few great memories 🙂 I’m just waiting for the day when we can ‘beam’ ourselves to wherever we want to go … just think of the savings on gas and tires !! … not to mention time … 🙂